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Wednesday December 19, 2012 6:41 AM

We should mourn, but we should be angry.

The horror in Newtown, Conn., should shake us out of the cowardice, the fear, the evasion and
the opportunism that prevent our political system from acting to curb gun violence.

How often must we note that no other developed country has such massacres on a regular basis
because no other comparable nation allows such easy access to guns? Those who respond logically, by
demanding solutions, are accused of “politicizing tragedy.”

It is time to insist that such craven propaganda no longer be taken seriously. If Congress does
not act this time, we can deem it as totally bought and paid for by the representatives of gun
manufacturers, gun dealers and their very well-compensated apologists. A former senior Obama
administration official once asked a good question: “If progressives are so worked up about how
Washington is controlled by the banks and Wall Street, why aren’t they just as worked up by the
power of the gun lobby?”

There was a different quality to President Obama’s response to this mass shooting. I think I
know why. It is not just that 20 young children were killed, although that would be enough.

There have been rumblings from the administration that Obama has been unhappy with his own
policy passivity in responding to earlier mass shootings and was prepared in his second term to
propose tough steps to deal with our national madness on firearms.

He spoke in Newtown in solidarity with the suffering, but pointed toward action. No, he said, we
are not “doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm.” He added: “We will have
to change.”

And his initial statement Friday pointed to his exasperation. “We have been through this too
many times,” he said, reciting our national litany of unspeakable events and insisting that we will
“have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless
of the politics.”

“Regardless of the politics.” That is what it will take. This phrase comes easily to a president
who just fought his last election, but he and the rest of us must change the politics of guns for
those who will face the voters again. We cannot just be sad. We must be angry. We must wield our
votes and declare that curbing gun violence is not one issue among many but a paramount concern for
our country.

And we will have to avoid the paralysis induced by those who cast every mass shooting as the
work of one deranged individual and never ever the result of flawed policies.

Yes, every social problem and every act of violence have complicated roots. But we already know
that it is far too easy to obtain guns in the United States and far too difficult to keep guns out
of the hands of those who should not have them. And we already know that weapons are available that
should not even be sold.

What, minimally, might “meaningful action” look like? We should begin with: bans on
high-capacity magazines and assault weapons; requiring background checks for all gun purchases;
stricter laws to make sure that gun owners follow safety procedures; new steps to make it easier to
trace guns used in crimes; and vastly ramped-up data collection and research on what works to
prevent gun violence, both of which are regularly blocked by the gun lobby.

After mass shootings, it’s always said we must improve our mental-health system and the
treatment of those who may be prone to violence. Of course we should. But this noble sentiment is
too often part of a strategy to evade any action on guns themselves.

Not this time. Americans are not the only people in the world who confront mental-health
problems. We are the only country that regularly experiences horrors of this sort. The difference,
as the writer Garry Wills has said, is that the United States treats the gun as a secular god,
immune to rational analysis and human intervention.

We must depose the false deity. We must act now to curb gun violence, or we never will.